Reading News

gga

Previously, I’ve been a Google Reader fan for my RSS news
reading needs. Now that I’m a proper Apple fan boi with an iPhone and
a MacBook Pro, I’ve switched to NetNewsWire. Waaay better. The
Google Reader iPhone app was what really drove me away. I’m probably
going to have to turn off my blog for this, but desktop applications
are frequently better than web applications. Heresy, I know. Google’s
iPhone Reader app has two specific problems:

It refreshes the page after you close a tab. This is pretty
irritating. Particularly if, like me, you only show unread
items. Things disappear while I’m still reading them. Aargh!

The big one: they ‘mobilize’ web pages. That is, instead of linking
to the original version of every item Google has decided to link to a
rewritten version of the item. Supposedly this version will be more
readable on the iPhone. Well, the iPhone actually has a really good
browser. But they’ve actually significantly broken something: the
iPhone web browser recognises YouTube URLs and opens them in the
built-in YouTube app. Because the iPhone web browser can’t play
YouTube movies. The rewriting means that this doesn’t work. Thank you
Google, thank you.

Anyway, there is one feature that I miss from Google Reader: sharing
items. But there’s the whole desktop application thing going on. I’m
now posting items I would have shared to my Twitter feed:
gga, look for items tagged #feed.